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independence3 unconnected · 2 more authors in those circles
applies to

b2b and consumer, no audience needed

confidence

high

evidence

13 claims · 7 articles · 4 receipts

window

2020-07-24 → 2025-07-21

3 builders who never spoke to each other

Move on a category while it is still forming

Getting in early to a rising platform or an unnamed category buys cheap attention and a chance to set the buying criteria before larger companies arrive. The work is keeping a standing watch on where demand is moving and being able to ship fast enough to act on what you spot.

The method

  1. 01

    Join an emerging category to become its reference source of information and to set the buying criteria - pricing model, expected integrations, what is standard versus premium - before large competitors arrive.

  2. 02

    Enter a market while it is still small, because customer attention is cheap there and the large incumbents cannot move fast enough to contest it.

  3. 03

    Enter a category while it is still new enough to have no recognised leader and while buyers are meeting the concept for the first time.

  4. 04

    Move into a brand new platform's ecosystem before the tools for it exist, since the gap closes fast once other builders notice.

  5. 05

    Build the companion tool for whichever platform is currently the thing everyone is talking about, aimed at what its users will want next.

What it returned

  • He defines emerging categories as under five years old with limited but growing awareness, citing Zero Trust, Observability, AIOps, ModelOps, Low-Code, No-Code and Managed Kubernetes; both Zero Trust and Low-Code came from Forrester analysts.

  • When the market later explodes the business scales with it, and he says this is the route most of the small-scale founders who made it big actually took.

  • Started the day Threads launched, when nothing he wanted as a creator had been built for it yet.

  • The pattern he points to is Sheet2Site sitting on Google Sheets, You Don't Need WordPress sitting on Google Docs and Notion2Site sitting on Notion, with the slot open at the time being a way to publish Roam notes as a search-friendly site.

Sources

the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

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More in positioning

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the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

963 corroborated plays to draw from · 3 a week

One email a week. Unsubscribe in one click, and the address is used for this and nothing else.